Been a few days! Between negotiating the return to work and beginning a very intense journey into Reading Things AgainTM, I haven't had much to talk about on the coding front. Today, I went back in for two lessons' worth of fun. One, I think, was almost entirely irrelevant to sound, but a fun aside to pursue.

Today I Learned:

A little bit about vector math--the dot product and cross product. Operations like these, performed on the ol' 3D Euclidean plane, are used to calculate all sorts of stuff like position, speed, physics checks and the like. Hitting this tutorial sent me on a random dive into vector algebra and math I haven't thought about in probably twenty years. It'd be interesting to take a fuller crash course through that stuff sometime down the line, but for now, I had to stop when I found myself observing a Java applet that exhibits one of the most popular proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Probably not something I need to be overly concerned with for now, but it's cool to see a) what vector math is b) why it's useful and that c) Unity has a bunch of built-in functions (or are they classes? constructors? Blah) for handling it.

About the fact that you can enable or disable components--you know, attachable functions like Lights, Physics, Scripts, etc. in the visual editing side of Unity--on the fly. While investigating that, I learned that you can create GameObjects on the fly, too, and started trying to enhance my learning experience on this tutorial by branching out. Predictably, this got me to a point where I started having issues with code compilation, and got stumped. Then, the net went down, and all progress halted.

Up Tomorrow:

I've sent off a volley to some of my C#-knowing buddies about the difficulties I was running into with my experiments into runtime GameObject creation in Unity. It's perplexing that shit's going wrong, especially since the code snippet flagged by the compiler as somehow bad (see below) was copy-pasted directly from the Unity documentation, but I'll get through it.

I would love to find a really, truly full and interactive guide to C# syntax somewhere on the net. Something where I could, say, plug in a line of code I've taken from somewhere and just have the various pieces identified. There are seemingly so many ways to write this stuff that it's tough to know what piece is doing what sometimes.